Past Colloquia

Soon gravitational waves will provide a completely new way to understand our universe. To fully exploit this opportunity efforts –and expertise– beyond gravity are required. This talk has then two purposes: One, to review some few examples of what has been understood from the theoretical…

Avishay Gal-Yam (Weizmann Institute of Science)

February 17, 201214:00 - 15:00

Cosmic explosions mark the violent deaths of stars. While the emission from the explosion itself (manifesting, e.g., as a supernova) is often very bright and can be studied in detail, understanding the nature of the progenitor systems of these events is more difficult, as these…

Adam Kraus (U. Hawaii)

February 09, 201214:00 - 15:00

Young and directly-imaged exoplanets offer critical tests of planet-formation models that can’t be matched by RV and transit surveys of mature stars. However, these targets have been extremely elusive to date, with no exoplanets younger than ~10-20 Myr and only a handful of directly-imaged planets…

Brad Cenko (Berkeley)

February 06, 201214:00 - 15:00

With convergence of both science (i.e., community interests) and technology (the advent of new facilities enabled by Moore’s Law), time-domain exploration of the sky promises to be a frontier pursuit in the coming decade. In this talk I will review two recent results from our efforts to characterize variability…

Keith Vanderlinde (McGill)

February 02, 201214:00 - 15:00

Two of the greatest mysteries in cosmology — and indeed all of modern physics — involve the exponential growth of space: the inflationary period of the early Universe, and the present-day Dark Energy-driven expansion. Recent technological advances are fuelling the exploration of these twin phenomena,…

Megan Eckart (Goddard SFC)

January 30, 201214:00 - 15:00

The development of a new detector technology often results in major advances in observational capabilities. Recently developed microcalorimeter detector arrays will revolutionize the study of the high-energy Universe by enabling non-dispersive spectrometers with high spectral resolution (R~1000-6000) in the soft X-ray band. These new instruments…

Gurtina Besla (Columbia University)

January 27, 201214:00 - 15:00

I will present a new numerical model of the evolution of the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC/SMC), in which their current internal structure and kinematics and large-scale gas morphology are dictated by their mutual tidal interactions, rather than…

Phil Muirhead (Caltech)

January 25, 201215:00 - 16:00

The field of extrasolar planets is rapidly evolving. The quest to discover ever-more and ever-smaller exoplanets has pushed the field in two primary detections: (1) toward a comprehensive assessment of the frequency and statistics of various types of exoplanets–used as a guide for planet formation…

James P. Lloyd (Cornell University)

January 20, 201214:00 - 15:00

Studies of the planet abundance as a function of stellar mass have suggested a strong increase in the frequency of planet occurrence around stars more massive than 1.5 Msun, and that such stars are deficit in short period planets. These planet searches have relied on…

Ilaria Pascucci (University of Arizona)

January 13, 201214:00 - 15:00

What is the origin of the Solar System and other planetary systems? We are living in an exciting era where the history of the Solar System is being revealed by in-situ measurements and sample returns from solar system objects, laboratory analysis of meteorites, and by…